There is a remarkable piece of writing in this issue about Epenow, a Wampanoag from Noepe in the early 1600s, who the writer identifies as the first Islander whose name we know. It’s a small observation that contains multitudes, forcing the reader, as it does, to stop for a moment and consider that every person who lived on the Island in the ten thousand or more years of human habitation before Epenow also had a name. A name implies a family: fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles. A name implies friends, and perhaps enemies.

Epenow had all of those. He also had a temper, which was well deserved, and the kind of personality that allowed him to look back at things that had happened to him in the past and recount them with humor and laughter to visitors from off-Island. These traits, too, are reminders that everyone who lived on the Island in the ten thousand or more years before someone wrote down Epenow’s name possessed not just an identity, but a full human life. A particular tone of voice, a manner of speaking, a sense of hope and of loss.

It’s not entirely accurate that Epenow is the first Islander whose name we know, 
of course, for there is the giant Moshup and his wife, Granny Squannit. You hear occasionally these days the theory that Moshup may not have needed to be a giant, but that the legend may instead harken back to the time some six to eight thousand years ago when rising seas first cut the Vineyard off from the mainland, and it would have indeed been possible for regular humans to wade across the tidal stream separating the new Island from the mainland. Someone with a name would have been the first to realize that the stream they used to wade had become too deep to cross. Someone was the last to insist that her grandparents really had waded it. As the sea rose, Moshup’s body grew – how else to explain his epic wade a hundred generations after anyone remembered being able to simply wait for low tide and walk to the mainland?

Much later, someone else with a name had her tall, strong son Epenow stolen by strangers and taken away across the sea, where his name was written down so that we remember him. Sort of. It’s more accurate to say we remember what his captors and others bothered to write down. There’s a story that Socrates tells in Plato’s Phaedrus of a wise king who is offered the invention of writing with the promise that it will allow his people not to forget. But the king turns it down, saying, “this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”

It may be true that the highest use of writing is a shopping list, which allows us to temporarily forget the important things we need from the grocery store. But I like to think of the few fragments of written evidence we have about Epenow – including the fact of his name – less like the full story of a person and more like beads in a rosary or a wampum belt: mnemonic windows into a deeper remembrance in which every ancestor is remembered to have a name, even if we don’t recall it at the moment.